October 17, 2007

Free Real Time Video Conferencing Is Here. Will You Use It?

We have always believed that soon we can just do video conference with anyone on our computer. We've seen them on movies and sci-fi or James Bond film. The interesting thing is that even though the technology actually existed today that allows us to chat to each-other on video in real time, this service has still not really taken off. One reason is not everyone wnats to be seen while on the phone. Real time video calling seems to be slow getting adoption. A start-up Tokbox think believes this is going to change. They provide a free service that allows users to talk with their friends via video web-cams in real-time. The good thing is absolutely NO client software to dowload. This is a key feature. To set up a real-time video conference you only need to send a link to the person that you want to speak with.

The co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, has a financial stake-holding in Tokbox and also sits on the board. Sequoia Capital who made billions by investing in and then selling YouTube also plan invest $4 million it them. Tokbox are also currently using the same office space that YouTube grew out of. The "free" service idea will ultiamately become an issue as big dollars are required for investments. Think about it, providing a real-time service, with a 200-millisecond response time worldwide, for multi party, multimedia sessions requires an intelligent global network. And there are four people in a meeting, sharing data, voice and video. We are dealing with multiple channels of real-time information each requiring optimization and synchronization. It is incredibly difficult to deliver real-time multimedia communications over the Internet, a fundamentally non-real time network which most people do not recognized.

Will Microsoft and Google play in this space. It is an absoulte yes. earlier this year Google bought this firm Marratech, a video conferencing and collaboration company, which will now compete with the likes of WebEx and GoToMeeting. Ultimately this will have full integration to existing Google services and all is free. When they're bringing in $1b+ per quarter in search revenue, they can afford to give these services away for free, with a little ad on the side naturally.

Comments

Free Real Time Video Conferencing Is Here. Will You Use It?

We have always believed that soon we can just do video conference with anyone on our computer. We've seen them on movies and sci-fi or James Bond film. The interesting thing is that even though the technology actually existed today that allows us to chat to each-other on video in real time, this service has still not really taken off. One reason is not everyone wnats to be seen while on the phone. Real time video calling seems to be slow getting adoption. A start-up Tokbox think believes this is going to change. They provide a free service that allows users to talk with their friends via video web-cams in real-time. The good thing is absolutely NO client software to dowload. This is a key feature. To set up a real-time video conference you only need to send a link to the person that you want to speak with.

The co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, has a financial stake-holding in Tokbox and also sits on the board. Sequoia Capital who made billions by investing in and then selling YouTube also plan invest $4 million it them. Tokbox are also currently using the same office space that YouTube grew out of. The "free" service idea will ultiamately become an issue as big dollars are required for investments. Think about it, providing a real-time service, with a 200-millisecond response time worldwide, for multi party, multimedia sessions requires an intelligent global network. And there are four people in a meeting, sharing data, voice and video. We are dealing with multiple channels of real-time information each requiring optimization and synchronization. It is incredibly difficult to deliver real-time multimedia communications over the Internet, a fundamentally non-real time network which most people do not recognized.

Will Microsoft and Google play in this space. It is an absoulte yes. earlier this year Google bought this firm Marratech, a video conferencing and collaboration company, which will now compete with the likes of WebEx and GoToMeeting. Ultimately this will have full integration to existing Google services and all is free. When they're bringing in $1b+ per quarter in search revenue, they can afford to give these services away for free, with a little ad on the side naturally.